Feeder Hutch

This is our rabbits' new feeder hutch. No longer shall they dine beneath the overturned bottom half of a dog crate! And best of all, I built it all by myself. With input from my husband, yes, but every mistake and cut and screw and bit of hardware cloth was done BY ME.

You can tell I'm a total amateur but all carpenters have to start sometime and why not now? I thought a rabbit feeding hutch was a great beginner project. Big enough to make me feel like I'd done something (not like a simple bird house) but not so difficult I'd throw up my hands in despair. And "rough" is okay, so imperfections aren't disastrous: they're merely "personal touches".

It measures two feet deep and four feet wide. It has a vertical welded wire "silo" on the left where we will put hay (timothy with some clover and a wee bit of alfalfa, when we get around to purchasing some). It will also have a pellet hopper eventually but for now it has a dogfood dish to hold the pellets (not visible at this angle). The bottom is hardware cloth because the rabbits really like to poo where they eat, and hopefully this will allow the poo to fall through. There is a gap at the bottom of the walls to facilitate changing of the hardware cloth, should we need to, and to shove poo out, should we need to. There is a nifty ramp that the rabbits don't use (they just jump right up and back down) but maybe kits will use it one day. The top is hinged to make it easier to get into the pellet-hopper-of-the-future (we plan on attaching it to the hutch) and there are latches to keep the hinged roof from blowing off in a storm. I still need to put some kind of roofing material on top but that's all that's lacking.

I guess I could clean up my scraps of 2x4 from the ground too, huh?

Anyway, this is my feeder hutch and I'm pretty darn proud of it, warts and all.